Monday, November 23, 1998
4:00 PM (refreshments 3:45)
Edgerton Hall, Room 34-101
EECS Colloquium
Abstract
On Tuesday November 2, 1998, the voters of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the State of California affirmed legislation to deregulate the electric power industry within their jurisdictions. The economic benefits of an open electrical energy market are clear given today’s technology, in which large thermal plants can be economically replaced by small gas turbine generators. The ballot initiatives in these states primarily dealt with how to handle so-called "stranded costs." Also important but receiving less consideration to date is the technology needed to operate the system reliably in the new environment.
We will discuss the concern that in the deregulated environment unanticipated generation profiles combined with less coordinated controls may make the system vulnerable to large scale outages. Furthermore, the underlying causes behind cascading failures have not been clearly identified and quantified, and present tools are inadequate for anticipating and avoiding such events. Liapunov-like energy function methods and direct time-step simulations both have limitations.
We will explore efforts to examine the effect of critical uncertainties in power system simulations studies. We present a technique developed for the study of global climate change and discuss its applicability to power systems studies. We close our presentation by emphasizing the need for further research to provide a deep understanding of phenomena exhibited by complex interconnected systems, and present some preliminary results of our recent research in this area.
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Modified: Nov 18, 1998|
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